If you'll pardon my song and singing voice, both of which were better until I gave my kidney on the left side to France in the war--and I've drunk myself half around the world cursing her for jerking it out--if I had it to do again, grand country though it is--I'd be the girl found lurking behind the army, or up with the hill folk, all of which is to rest me a little of my knowledge, until I can get back to it. I'm coming to something. Misericordia, am I not the girl to know of what I speak? We go to our Houses by our nature--and our nature, no matter how it is, we all have to stand--as for me, so God has made me, my house is the pissing port. Am I to blame if I've been summoned before and this my last and oddest call? In the old days I was possibly a girl in Marseilles thumping the dock with a sailor, and perhaps it's that memory that haunts me. The wise men say that the remembrance of things past is all that we have for a future, and am I to blame if I've turned up this time as I shouldn't have been, when it was a high soprano I wanted, and deep corn curls to my bum, with a womb as big as the king's kettle, and a bosom as high as the bowsprit of a fishing schooner? And what do I get but a face on me like an old child's bottom--is that a happiness, do you think?
I've given my destiny away by garrulity, like ninety per cent of everybody else--for, no matter what I may be doing, in my heart is the wish for children and knitting. God, I never asked better than to boil some good man's potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine months by the calendar. Is it my fault that my only fireside is the outhouse? And that I can never hang my muffler, mittens and Bannybrook umbrella on anything better than a bit of tin boarding as high as my eyes, having to be brave, no matter what, to keep the mascara from running away?
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (emphases mine)